Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It happened. The people of Lebanon stood up against their government and rejected it’s currency, the Lebanese pound, in favor of bitcoin. They did this because of how bad the Lebanese pound has depreciated. It has faced a 20% depreciation since April. As of right now the Lebanese pound is trading for more than 5,000 per $1 US Dollar. The people of Lebanon would not stop there, however. They decided to take things a little further.

On June 11, 2020, the Lebanese people forced their way into the central bank in Tripoli and once they occupied it, they decided to set fire to it. The people in Lebanon have suffered from their central bank the same ways Americans suffer because of ours. High unemployment, growing debt along with slow economic growth. This all being paired up with their government forced lockdowns due to CoronaVirus, which hindered their economy much like ours, the Lebanese people were angry and they sure showed it.

This begs one question: why can Americans not express this same sort of anger towards our central bank, which is the Federal Reserve? We do not even need to be violent. The recent and countless protests against the killing of George Floyd has inspired people to peacefully go about making things better. These have been things such as Minneapolis disbanding their police force,Rand Paul introducing the Breonna Taylor Act, a bill which will put an end to no-knock warrants, and Justin Amash introducing a bill which could end Qualified Immunity which protects cops from being sued even when they violate our civil rights.

These are good things. All steps in the right direction. What we need to do however, in order to have more liberties in more areas of life, is direct our efforts towards fighting or rejecting other leeches which suck off our freedom. And one of those leeches, if not the biggest leech, is the Federal Reserve.

How do we go about this task though? Violence is not the best route because when dealing with the State, it is highly likely their fire power will out match any regular citizen. Besides, we want to win hearts and minds, not achieve our political aims through the use of force. We are better than our enemies, so let’s act like it. So that leaves us with only peaceful resolutions (for now).

Education is one way to make people more aware of the Federal Reserve and its effects on our way of life. It’s probably best to not just try and get the people around you to read books on the subject. Most people’s reading comprehension is not the best in general, so attempting to read a subject they are not familiar with may scare them off. Therefore, a good and natural way to go about it is to try and point out the effects the Federal Reserve has on our everyday life.

Your friend is complaining about the rising prices of everything in life? Let them know this is because of the Fed devaluing our money by printing so much of it. Know a college student who is hampered down by their student loan debt? Tell them how it's the Fed, who sets an artificial interest rate, that has such a great effect on it. Is your society going through an economic recession and the people within it are paying for it? Bailouts? Unemployment? Cuts to quality of goods and services? All of those happen because of the Fed’s failings.

Perhaps then there could be protests that take shape in some different forms. One way could be the rejection of the Fed’s money itself and embracing the use of currencies that make it harder for governments to trace or tax your financial transactions. Or even just demonstrations put on by people outside the Fed could pressure lawmakers to push to audit the Fed.

Really, anytime the US government does anything the American people do not like, we should protest the Fed. The Fed is the lifeline for every single one of the State’s actions, their agencies and their corporate friends. If it was not for the Fed, these agencies and corporations would not be able to be as strong and rich as they are. Government actions such as pushing us into war and keeping us there and subsidizing mega corporations are made possible through the Fed’s endless supply of printable money. The only people who suffer from the value the dollar loses due to this printing is the American people ourselves.

After the educating is done and people have learned a bit, we must be vocal about this issue. For the last couple of weeks, all kinds of Americans have been repeating the slogan “silence is violence” over and over. Well, in this case the Fed is literally the lifeline of the State that keeps all of the branches on the State’s tree alive and well. The State is inherently violent. By being silent about something that is not only hurting us as individuals but is in fact hurting every single American, even the generations unborn, are we being complicit in this crime against the American people?

“#EndTheFed” should be just as popular as “#DefundThePolice” or “#BlackLivesMatter”. Ending the Fed would absolutely help the goals of those movements be met sooner, so to take on the Fed is a must for them. Why are they not talking about it? It’s simple really: because we have been brainwashed. The American Public Education system has been engineered to make us not really think about the monetary system we have and its implications for us. Most American teenagers are taught in school that capitalism caused every economic recession there has been, rather than the truth which is that these business cycles we have faced in America have been induced artificially by the Federal Reserve and their controlling of the interest rates along with their control over the printing of our money.

It’s time to remove these rose tinted glasses and realize central banks are the cancer that ails our society and not the cure which makes society and the people within it prosper. When a society is prospering, it’s economy is prospering. For an economy to prosper, the people within that economy must have some power behind their dollar. To make that possible in America, we must end the Fed. It’s time for us to get loud about the issue and bring the noise wherever we can. Afterall, silence is violence.